Fantasy Football Draft Guide for 2007 Season
Fantasy Football league draft or auctions are starting to take shape. 'Tis the season so to speak as we turn the corner into August. Most leagues probably won't form and hold their annual gatherings until the end of August or early September but that's no reason to not start thinking about and planning for that day. For those of us who absolutely LOVE fantasy football, the week of NFL training camp openings is not too dissimilar from the start of the twelve days of Christmas, they both lead to my favorite time of the year. Below is a guide to help your planning for the 2007 fantasy football season.
Fantasy Football Magazines - there are literally several dozen iterations, I personally find most of my information online but I'm still tied to picking up a couple key unique and authoritative sources of FF information. Here is a link to FF magazine reviews.
Sleeper / Bust / Comeback Player Lists - Each year its easy to identify who are the key fantasy 'studs' to draft but what makes or breaks the best teams is who can identify those players who will be better than expected and/or worse. Here is a list of posts for those articles -
RotoNews Sleepers & Busts
Protrade Sleepers & Busts
NFL.com's Comeback Player List
Financially Motivated Sleepers (AKA - in a contract year)
NFL.com's Sleeper List
Breakout Players for 2007
NFL Rookies - again, this is the new blood entering the NFL. If you don't know who is who, you may miss out on a key opportunity to dominant your league.
Top 16 NFL Rookies from a Fantasy Football Perspective - this is from a PAFFL perspective but will give you a nice overview and review. Each player links to a full page profile and analysis.
Positional Analysis - this is important but less so than the above two sections b/c most of these players are known, what's key is to understand how free agent acquisitions and draft choices will fit into their respective new squads.
QB - NFL.com's team by team analysis
RB - NFL.com's team by team analysis
WR - NFL.com's team by team analysis
Auction Values - for those of you in Auction leagues (PAFFL is one such league), there is some good info out there on player values in an auction environment.
NFL.com's Player Value for Auctions
There are countless other great resources out there to help you prepare, the key is making sense of all the information. One of the ironic consequences of the internet age is that sleeper/bust lists use to be published by a few key magazines and were extremely important to fantasy leaguers. Now you get literally hundreds of opinions all pushing some of the same players (such as DeAngelo Williams, Jerious Norwood, Kevin Curtis, Vincent Jackson among dozens of others) which results in their value likely being greater than veteran players more likely to be productive (such as Donald Driver, Ahman Green, Trent Green) and valuable but less glamorous because of their age & productivity.
Just keep that in mind as you enter your auction or draft, and stick to a course of action but be flexibility. I always love the quote, "plans are worthless but planning is critical", which is saying research your position and options, and be prepared to take advantage of changes during your fantasy football event.
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Posted by: thedope | July 26, 2007 at 11:00 AM